Blackbeard: The Birth of America Reviewed By Dr. Wesley Britton of Bookpleasures.com

Dr. Wesley Britton

Reviewer Dr. Wesley
Britton: Dr. Britton is the author of four non-fiction books on
espionage in literature and the media. Starting in fall 2015, his new
six-book science fiction series, The Beta-Earth Chronicles, debuted
via BearManor Media. For seven years, he was co-host of online
radio’s Dave White Presents where he contributed interviews with a
host of entertainment insiders. Before his retirement in 2016, Dr.
Britton taught English at Harrisburg Area Community College. Learn
more about Dr. Britton at hisWEBSITE

Over the years, I’ve
read a number of Samuel Marquis’s historical thrillers. I’ve
become a fan who’s happy with pretty much every volume, many of
which are set during World War II. Among the many surprises of his
new Blackbeard is the time period the story is set in. I’ve never
associated Marquis with the early decades of the 18th century or the
seas of the Caribbean and the pirates that sailed on them circa
1716-1718.

Another major surprise is
Marquis’s portrayal of Blackbeard, the privateer turned pirate. I
was surprised to see the pirate always referred to as Edward Thatch
and not Edward Teach, the surname I always associated with
Blackbeard. Well, Google for both names and both names will come up
in multiple entries. Whatever handle Marquis gives his character, few
readers are likely to anticipate seeing Blackbeard painted in the
most heroic portrait possible, at least for the first two/thirds of
the book.

Marquis’s Blackbeard
tries to avoid violence by only attacking ships that offer little
resistance to minimize the carnage his crew might endure.
He’s a giant figure, a charismatic leader able to use eloquence to
sway his extremely democratic sea-farers to his point of view. The
pirates operate within the rules of the “articles” that give
every man an equal vote in important decisions and an equal share in
any booty. There is no racism. We see this most evident in the
character of Cesar, a former black slave now devoted to Blackbeard.

The pirates’ motives are
in part economic, part political, and part a lust for the free life.
At first, pirate captains have charters given to them by royal
governors based in the New World to attack Spanish and French ships.
But many dislike British King George from the House of Hanover and
would prefer the crowning of James III from the House of Stuart.
For such reasons, Blackbeard’s small but powerful flotilla start
attacking British ships in part to rebel against those who are rich
and abusive to the common man. The pirates start
describing themselves as “Robin Hoods,” distributing wealth much
more fairly than royal charters.

Another major character is
Steede Bonnet, a Barbados plantation owner who throws it all away to
become a pirate for the freedom of a life at sea despite his less
than adequate knowledge of sea-going ways. Woven throughout the
scenes set in the Caribbean and up the Atlantic coast, we also spend
time on land with Alexander Spotswood, the despotic, vindictive and
tyrannical lieutenant governor of Virginia. For Spotswood, capturing
Blackbeard is a political move calculated to curry favor in England.
Very unpopular with his colony’s citizens, he suppresses any
desires brought to him from the Virginia House of Burgesses that
might erode his powers. He despises the new term of “Americans”
and, in many ways, embodies the complaints the founders of the United
States would fight against in just over fifty years.

So the “Golden Age of
Piracy” is portrayed as the precursor for the American Revolution
with Blackbeard and his cohorts the real patriots, at least in their
own opinion. In Marquis’s realm, these salty dogs
never lacked for self-righteous self-justification. I suspect it’s
my own preconceived notions, but I frequently found it difficult to
accept the verisimilitude of these noble scalawags. I am perhaps a
modern victim of the propaganda that cast Blackbeard as a vicious
criminal in Boston newspapers of the time. I was also put off a bit
by Marquis frequently repeating his points over and over which seemed
like rather overdoing it. Padding?

The book never really
builds up a head of steam, at least until the final third where
Blackbeard realizes his flotilla has grown too large, that the
British admiralty is about to end the age of freebooting piracy, and
he makes some turning-point choices very different from what we’ve
come to expect from him. Lots of surprises in this fast-moving
section of the book.

Throughout,
Marquis’s gifts for description and character development are on
full display to take his readers to times and places that, in this
case, are captured in ways few of us would expect.
His closing end notes make it clear he sketched out most of this
novel drawing from a wide spectrum of resources, many of them of
rather recent vintage.

So, from page one to his
appendices, unless you too are a Blackbeard scholar, Blackbeard: The
Birth of America will be a constantly eye-opening series of
surprises. You’ll feel certain you’re learning something as the
story progresses. Pirates as the original American revolutionaries?
Marquis builds a vivid and convincing case that is so.